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Call Spam

Credit card (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the past couple of years I’ve had a problem with call spam. I don’t know how or why I ended up on the call list, but my frustration level is increasing and I currently don’t see a way to stop this nonsense. I’m posting this here in hopes that someone in a similar situation will comment with their experience.

The message is always the same. The call starts with a recording stating that because of my good credit rating a credit card company is offering to lower my APR. I can press 1 to speak with a representative. If I don’t press 1 the call drops before they can leave a message.

If I do press 1, I’m on hold for a few seconds, then a pushy representative comes on the line asking questions about my debt (how much, number of open lines of credit, etc). If I say I don’t want to share, they answer by saying that they already have all of this info, they’re just asking me to verify.

There are a couple of tricky parts to this. If I even start the phrase “remove me from your calling list”, or any variant of it, they hang up. That’s right, they hang up before I can ask them to stop calling me. And, they’ve called me enough for me to know that they’re very twitchy about this. I don’t know how they make any money because they’re so quick to hang up on you.

The second tricky thing is that they call from a wide variety of numbers. Very rarely do they call from the same number more than twice. This means that blocking a particular number does nothing. They have a bank of numbers that they’re using, so if I block one they’ve got dozens of others to use.

Here’s a list of the numbers that they’ve used to contact me.

701-671-9224

479-274-1769

508-475-1388

971-220-1781

402-982-0422

775-410-1104

250-448-7574

616-216-2172

251-725-1770

263-989-7373

773-340-4844

These are just the recent ones. I didn’t start keeping track of this until around Thanksgiving of last year (yes, they’ve called me from each of these numbers within the past two months!).

I’m beside myself trying to figure out how to stop this. They call at all hours of the day & night (I’ve gotten these calls as late as 11pm), and they just don’t stop. I can’t even find out the name of the company, so how am I supposed to make them stop?

Hopefully someone will find this via a phone number search and leave a comment. Maybe if they’re blasting you with this nonsense we can put our heads together and figure out how to end this.